While some animals die, or slowly vanish due to overkilling and destruction of habitat, other animals are seizing the opportunity to become even more successful. Sometimes growing much larger, breeding more frequently, and becoming vastly more numerous. You have to admire the stubbornness and indomitability of life. Nature is various and complex, never failing to seize any opportunity for expansion. Nature is optimistic.
Sometimes I like to imagine that if there were beings on a higher plane of existence, nearly immortal and outside the bounds of time and material constraints they might regard the biological infestation of earth with curiosity. It’s almost as if our planet were a roiling mass of things coming into and going out of being, feeding off one another, birth and death, consumption and elimination, like a fungal mass or vegetable bloom, or infected sore, or a giant heart, pulsing with life.
Even when I consider my own body I am ignorant of everything that is going on there. I have some understanding of my digestion, respiration, etc., but I still don’t understand why or how I think or behave the way I do. Is it determined by chemicals, hormones, and biological processes? In some way, I am simply a well-developed colony organism. If you were able to keep my cells fed with oxygen and sugars I would continue to ‘live’, if you were somehow able to compel my pilotless body into exercising its muscles I would continue on in much the same way I do now, physically-speaking. My living cells could be grown in petri dishes for countless millenia, long after ‘I’ have departed. What is it that makes me who I am? In this sense I understand reincarnation as my life is arguably little different in substance than anyone else’s. These same questions have been asked and the general trajectory of my life has certainly been experienced by my predecessors.
I’m not so sure that humans are the height of earth evolution, or the masters of creation, but we are certainly its witnesses. We pop into being thrown right into the mix of it, eyes open and questing. One moment a drop of fluid and the next a handful of dust. Slaves to the movements we barely comprehend and acknowledge. Not until we have that real awareness that we are tied to it and that the only lasting significance we possess is in our relationship to its whole. And nothing last forever, our short lives and everyone and everything around us and after us will disappear in the same quiet way. No posthumous monuments can preserve your memory. Even our known universe is powerless against time. By current theories either expanding forever outward until all matter and energy is infinitely diffuse or collapsing back into the tiny nugget of matter and energy that preceeded the birth of our universe.